Clocks move forward to extend daylight hours

Daylight saving time has begun in Russia, with clocks moving forward one hour. But as people prepare for longer days, there are some who won't be adjusting to summer time.

There is a place in Moscow where time won't change – the place which measures, keeps and sets the time for the nation.

It's the Institute for the Measurement of Time and Space.

“It's a purely administrative act. And it means that we change the origin of our time calculation to get benefits to save some daylight period for our everyday activity. At level of our national time scale no changes have happened,” explains Nikolay Koshelyaevsky from the Institute for the Measurement of Time and Space.

More daylight is almost certainly a bonus though it might pose a problem for those who are busy enough as it is.

People often complain there are too few minutes in an hour and too few hours in a day. With clocks going forward they may actually be right.

But for most the time change goes unnoticed. Clocks are moved in the middle of the night, so barring the one less hour of sleep, few are actually affected by it. Of course, that is only true for those working during the day. For those with a round-the-clock schedule, the process gets a little tougher… and that includes services such as transport, medicine, the broadcasting sector, and even work up in space. But they've all found ways to deal with it. The mission control centre in Russia's star city is a place where even different time zones don't affect work.

“Since the beginning of the international space station, for convenience, a decision was made to use Greenwich Mean Time. Flight planning is very complicated and takes a lot of time, so we need a time scale that's continuous and doesn't go back and forth,” said Mikhail Pronin from the Mission Control Center.

Well it looks like the ISS crew won't be losing an hours sleep and it seems most ordinary folk are getting used to changing their clocks every six months.